Probably over a year ago, the song M.T.A. by the Kingston Trio came on and it sounded really familiar, but I couldn’t place why. Given that I’ve recently moved to the Boston area I figured I’d give the song a google to educate myself on the local culture, and what I learned is that M.T.A. is part of a nearly 150-year lineage of folk tunes. These songs are a family linked by their recycling of lyrical and melodic ideas, and the whole family is in a category I’m going to call “disaster ballads”. This probably isn’t the technical term, and I should probably take an actual music history class, but nevertheless, these songs all center around something bad happening and the way that that affects the people. A quintessential example of this might be Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. What I think is so interesting about M.T.A.’s family of songs is that though their melodies largely stay the same, the nature of the disasters they chronicle changes quite a bit with each iteration. In order to discuss how these songs disasters have changed over the decades, I have to start with the granddaddy of them all from 1865.
1865 - The Ship that Never Returned
There were sweet farewells, there were loving signals
while the form was yet discerned.
Though they knew it not, twas a solemn parting
for the ship she never returned.
The Ship that Never Returned is a very old tune, so I hope you’ll accept this recording from 1927. It was written in 1865 by Henry Clay Work, an abolitionist from Connecticut whose other work includes Marching Through Georgia (about Sherman’s march to the sea) and Kingdom Coming (which… doesn’t hold up lyrically). The Ship that Never Returned checks out, though, and it’s really a testament to Work’s tunewriting ability that his melody was able to remain an earworm for over 150 years. Despite the title, the song isn’t really about the ship itself. In contrast to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, another disaster ballad about a shipwreck, The Ship that Never Returned is uninterested in the specifics of this ship’s demise. The lyrics are more interested in the impact of the lost ship on the lives of the passengers’ loved ones. The song doesn’t name the lost ship or any characters, and in doing so it generalizes its lost ship into an analogue for all lost ships as a way of discussing the impact of the whole category of disaster. The disaster is framed as sort of a natural byproduct of the nautical life - some ships just wont return - and the song is focussed on processing the grief associated with that. Given that The Ship that Never Returned was written in the midst of the Civil War I would imagine that a 1960s audience would be fairly familiar with this sort of a tragedy.
c. 1924 - Wreck of the Old 97
Well they gave him his orders at Monroe, Virginia.
Said "Steve, you're way behind time.
This is not 38, this is ol' 97,
you must put her into Spencer on time"
Unlike The Ship that Never Returned, Wreck of the Old 97 is based on a specific event: the 1903 derailment of a mail train (the titular Old 97). The ballad (i.e. the lyrics) was written at an unknown date to be sung to the tune of The Ship that Never Returned. As recorded by Vernon Dalhart in 1924, Wreck of the Old 97 became the first country record to sell a million copies. The popularity of said recording brought it to the attention of David Graves George, who claimed to have written the lyrics after being one of the first on the scene of the original accident, and who was not credited by Victor (the publisher) or by any of the “old-time” artists who had published recordings. Following one of the first musical copyright suits, the court ordered Victor to pay George $65k in 1933 money ($1.2 million today). The court did not order Victor to grant George ownership of the song, though, and thus George appealed the case the entire way to the US Supreme Court which dismissed it due to a late court filing. Victor retained ownership of the ballad until (I assume) the copyright lapsed in the 50s.
I’ve included Johnny Cash’s live recording of Wreck of the Old 97 here instead of the 1924 version because Johnny Cash’s version slaps. It was also my introduction to this family of songs and probably why I felt like I’d heard M.T.A. before when I hadn’t. Cash does leave out a verse, though, so here’s a link to Vernon Dalhart’s 1924 recording as well. “Live at San Quentin” (the source of the Cash recording) was recorded in 1969, a full decade after M.T.A., which makes me wonder what Johnny Cash thought of M.T.A. and if that opinion factored in to the decision to perform Wreck of the Old 97 (besides it just being the sort of old tune that Johnny was known for). It certainly seems like these days M.T.A. is the far more popular song. From the sound of the recording, I’m willing to bet that the band and the entire audience had grown up with Wrech of the Old 97 and were plenty familiar with the song. The band is clearly having a lot of fun with the tune, substituting the harmonica parts for guitar solos, and you can hear Johnny Cash leading the crowd in making train noises along to the music. The more modern style also makes sense since the album was contemporaneous with stuff like “Abbey Road” and “Led Zeppelin II”. I feel like that really throws into relief how much of a Weenie Hut Jr. the 1924 recording is by comparison.
Wreck of the Old 97’s disaster is to some degree framed as the result of the known dangers of the railroad - derailments are a thing that is known to happen. At the same time, though, the blame for the accident is placed squarely with the conductor’s superiors, who pressured him to “put her into Spencer on time”. With these lyrics you start to see a transition from a disaster that is sort of a natural, known occurrence, to a preventable disaster caused by social pressures. This is sort of reflective of a half-century of cultural change - not only did railroads become the defining mode of transportation, but there was increasing public scrutiny of the safety standards of private companies, railways included.
1949/1959 - M.T.A.
Charlie handed in his dime at the Kendall Square station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him, "One more nickel"
Charlie couldn't get off of that train!
M.T.A. is where things start to get fun. The song has a very interesting history in that it was originally written as a campaign song for Walter O’Brien, a Progressive Boston mayoral candidate. The lyrics reference the Boston subway’s high fares, specifically that at one point you apparently had to pay extra to get off the T. Wild stuff. O’Brien lost the election and was promptly McCarthy’d but the song was revived a decade later by the Kingston Trio (who changed “Walter” to “George” in the lyrics to avoid the association with a socialist). The Kingston Trio also added an incredibly melodramatic spoken-word intro to explain the song’s context, which makes me wonder why they decided to cover something so Boston-specific in the first place.
With the Kingston Trio’s version, M.T.A. became a pretty popular folk revival tune with an abundance of covers and parodies. The song was popular enough that the character of “Charlie on the MTA”, doomed to do something as banal as ride the subway for all eternity, has entered the popular consciousness and is referenced even in non-musical contexts. Most notably, the modern MBTA (renamed from the MTA in 1964) named their fare card the “CharlieCard” after the Charlie from this song.
In M.T.A., the disaster has become something that’s completely societal. No one is physically harmed by Charlie being stuck on the train, but by borrowing a tune that had already been used for two popular disaster ballads, the original songwriter was able to invoke the “disaster” genre to lend severity to a real political issue. Even though the actual scenario is kind of absurd (Charlie’s wife can slip him a sandwich, but not another nickel?) I think the original audience would have picked up on what the songwriter was trying to do - frame the MTA fare increase as an issue on par with a missing ship or a train wreck.
1998 - Skinhead on the MBTA
There are multiple internet articles out there that mention the first three of these songs as a group, but they all stop at 1959. I aim to right this wrong by adding Dropkick Murphys’ 1998 Skinhead on the MBTA to the discussion.
Skinhead goes down to the Kendall Square Station
And he changes for Jamaica Plain
The conductor says: "Skinhead I need a nickel,"
Skinhead punches him in the brain
(Quick sidebar because I was unclear on the skinhead vs. neo-nazi relationship before I looked in to it: skinheads as a subculture don’t have a specific political affiliation. From what I’ve seen, Dropkick Murphys does NOT tolerate nazis.)
I absolutely love this cover because, first off, it sounds like it was recorded after one of the band members just went “hey guys let’s play MTA” in the recording studio and then they just gave it a whirl, completely off the dome. They’re Bostonians so they clearly grew up around the original song. Skinhead’s lyrics sound like what the lead singer came up with on like the first take just riffing off of his knowledge of the original. It gets farther from the original every verse, too: verse one he substitutes “Charlie” for “Skinhead” and then from there starts crafting a whole new narrative from there as he went along. Maybe I’m reading too much into this and they did sit down and put some thought in but I think it’s very fun either way.
What I find interesting about the new narrative is that it completely inverts the disaster of M.T.A.. The Skinhead is confronted by an authority figure asking for his nickle, clocks him, and then steals the train. How do you steal a subway car??? That takes some balls to attempt, let alone somehow get away with. In this cover, the protagonist is not the recipient of a disaster, but the cause, and the song itself celebrates that disaster. It’s pretty punk rock to rework a lineage of songs about disaster to place the former victim in the position of power and control.
Conclusion
I don’t have much of a wrap-up here but I think these songs are good and I hope you enjoyed listening to them. I hope you now feel empowered to write your own version of The Ship that Never Returned. 2020 certainly has no shortage of disasters to choose from.